Doorknobs and microbes are the joint area of interest of this report:
“Robotic Doorknob Disinfector,” Matthew Scott Rosoff, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
“The robotic door-handle disinfector is a robotic platform that travels heavily trafficked hallways and disinfects door-handles to improve public health. Machine learning algorithms were created to help the Erratic™ robotic platform navigate hallways and identify door-handles using only a commercial webcam and a laser scanner. A parts-based and a texture-based machine learning object detector were tested in a real-world environment. With the addition of a wall-aligning motion control algorithm, the partsbased object detector consistently detected >85% of the doorknobs in the environment and false-alarmed in <1% of the image frames. The robot does not require a map of the environment nor any modification to the environment. At the conclusion of the research project, the robot can autonomously navigate hallways and disinfect with UV light to help hospitals and other heavily infectious areas achieve lower infection rates.”
BONUS: The String and the Doorknob
